Is this the end of the United Progressive Alliance, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Congress-party led alliance?

That’s the question Indian media has been asking since West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced that her party, the Trinamool Congress, would pull out of the coalition.

The UPA, which relies on TMC’s 19 seats to form its Parliamentary majority, came under fire last week after it unveiled a series of sweeping economic reforms aimed at boosting growth, including a plan to allow foreign supermarkets to operate in the country.

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Ms. Banerjee, who claims these proposals would hurt the country’s small retailers, has given the government a three-day window to rollback proposed reforms before she officially withdraws support on Friday.

Several politicians and influential commentators responded to the development late Tuesday. Many, including the government’s main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, argued that early federal polls were inevitable in India. Others, however, felt the battle was not yet over for the Congress-led government.

Here’s a roundup of how they reacted:

“Trinamool walking out is an opportunity, not a threat,” read a Thursday editorial in the Times of India.

Noting that Ms. Banerjee “put a moratorium on policymaking,” the editorial urged the Congress-led coalition to make most of her exit by pushing key policies—from bilateral ties with Bangladesh to land acquisition reforms–which were “hobbled” by TMC’s opposition.

“Clearly, her backing for the government depends on its kissing reforms goodbye. For the UPA, that’s an unaffordable trade-off,” it said.

It’s time the government “signalled that it is driven less by an ethic of survival-by-any-means and more by a politics of conviction,” the piece said. “Else, with the national stage hijacked by competitive populism and political brinkmanship, it will get the lion’s share of the blame for non-governance and economic stagnation.”

Headlined “UPA 3,” a Wednesday editorial in the Indian Express welcomed Ms. Banerjee’s move to quit the ruling coalition.

With Ms. Banerjee out of the picture, “internal resistance, real and imagined, has largely dissolved for UPA,” it said, criticizing the fiery politician for opposing key overhauls – from railway reforms to land acquisition proposals – during UPA’s second tenure.

The piece went on to take a dig at TMC ministers for their inaction in Parliament and for repeatedly sidelining “UPA’s needs” for Ms. Banerjee’s “whims.” “Their leaving the government now is no worse than their being inside it.” In fact, their resignations only offer “room for improvement” in decision making, the piece added.

Unknowingly, “the UPA has ended up offloading one of its biggest problems,” the piece said, adding that Ms. Banerjee’s antics were unlikely to destabilize the government.

With “patient negotiations and hard bargains,” Congress is likely to persuade other regional parties – the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party – to support it in Parliament. Now, “the prime minister can no longer offer ‘coalition compulsions’ as a reason for inaction.

His government must exert itself fully in the time it has left,” the editorial asserted.

But not all commentators shared the same view.

“This is one time when [Ms. Banerjee] cannot be faulted,” read a Thursday editorial in The Hindu.

Congress, it said, made matters worse through its “insensitive handling of the crisis” and by daring “Ms. Banerjee to act on her threat to withdraw support.”

“The Trinamool leader saw the taunts as an assault on her self-respect and did precisely what the Congress believed she would not do,” the editorial justified.

Though the piece was critical of Congress, it felt Ms. Banerjee’s exit was not enough to topple the ruling alliance. “But in pursuing the chimera of Walmart-induced growth, the UPA runs the risk of losing the one big battle that is looming in 2014,” it concluded.

In an NDTV debate late Tuesday, Suravaram Sudhakar Reddy, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India, lashed out at the Congress party, arguing that it had committed “suicide” by proposing reforms to boost foreign investment.

Hailing Ms. Banerjee’s move, Mr. Reddy claimed that “all political parties” were gearing up for early elections, which in his view, seemed “inevitable” at this juncture. General elections are slated for 2014.

BJP spokesmanPrakash Javadekar agreed, attacking Congress for its “arrogance” and saying that their “anti-people” decisions were to blame for the ongoing crisis. “We are preparing ourselves for the next elections, whenever they might be,” he said.

On the same panel, senior Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyer said that the party would not succumb to the pressures of coalition politics. “We cannot be in government only to be in power. We also need to be in government in order to govern,” he said.

The Congress politician, however, said that the government was, to a certain degree, willing to “rethink” policies to reconcile with the TMC.

“But to what extent? I don’t know yet,” he added.

For Congress, Ms. Banerjee’s announcement was no less than “death by a thousand cuts,” M.J. Akbar, the editorial director of the weekly India Today, said during a televised debate on Headlines Today. Mr. Akbar, though in favor of the proposed reforms, criticized the Congress party for its hasty approach to push them through. The party acted as though “allies were at its mercy,” he argued.

Mr. Akbar said “the ability to govern by the UPA has been seriously diminished, if not destroyed.”

“The longer the UPA continues to pretend to be a government, the worse will be its fate in elections,” he warned.

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India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.